Exploring individuals' workplace spirituality in the context of their work teams: A qualitative multi‐case, multi‐team study

Abstract

Spirituality has been associated with a person's desire to perform meaningful work and to feel connected with the community that is being served through this work. Since most adults spend a large amount of their productive hours at work pursuing meaning and purpose in their jobs, the concept of workplace spirituality (WS) has gained considerable attention. The nature of work has also increasingly shifted to the use of teams of expert talent to solve complex problems, thus calls for further research on team member behaviors that effect team productivity and team member motivation have been made. With the prevalence of work teams, a better understanding of individuals' WS in work teams is needed, yet, limited empirical research has been conducted on this topic. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to better understand how individuals express and experience WS within their work teams and how their WS influences their work teams. A qualitative multi‐case, multi‐team design was employed using face‐to‐face, semi‐structured individual interviews, collective work team interviews, observations, and field notes as the primary approaches to data collection. Data analyzed in this study using thematic analysis included 19 individual team member interviews, and six collective team interviews representing a total of six teams across two organizations. The findings and contributions of this study are presented, along with a future research agenda.

Employee Engagement With Corporate-Based Health and Wellness Programs: A Multiple Regression Analysis

“…Moreover, this work directly responds to the call by Wang (2019) who suggested that HRD must cross boundaries and by doing so, builds on the best of multiple fields and opens new eras of social science research. We were inspired by and agreed with Alagaraja and Githens (2016) who articulated that the future of HRD goes beyond traditional boundaries of learning and development and is increasingly pushing into other contexts of life, such as workplace spirituality (e.g., McClurg et al, (2023). Here, we connect that to what it could mean in the Future of Work and what implications that could have for work life integration, work life boundaries, and how contexts of work and health are intertwined.…”

“I’d Rather Do It Single-Handed”—Nursing Students’ Struggles with Group Assignments: A Qualitative Study

“…The nursing students had tried not to confront peers directly and sought harmonious relationships. Other studies also found that teammates endeavored to maintain harmonious relationships with peers, particularly in cultures where collective interests were honored over individual ones [43,44]. As a Chinese society, Macau is influenced by the Chinese individualism and collectivist culture.…”

Nietzsche’s three metamorphoses of the spirit and Schopenhauer’s primordial suffering: an organizational culture change model redefining spirituality in the workplace

“…Working becomes meaningful through a transformative focus (Bhaskar and Mishra, 2019) on organizational spirituality identified with an alignedinternally and externallysocially responsible (Barron and Chou, 2017;Salem et al, 2023) and participative (Dutschke et al, 2019) value driven organizational culture, fostering individual spiritual development and well-being (Pawar, 2016). Given this condition, in addition to work, people develop friendly relationships, enhancing cooperation, creativity and innovation (Fasbender et al, 2023), interacting in a synergistic teamwork environment and communicating in a respectful and responsive way, expressing selfreflection (Hunsaker and Ding, 2022;McClurg et al, 2023), helping them to affirm in favor of life (Prabhu and Modem, 2022) fulfilling a purpose (Nehra, 2023), responding even conventionally to existential concerns.…”

“…The employee-camel is presented as a patient "machine component", that kneels down before faith, before the "sacred work" as a duty (Ramaswamy et al, 2023), seeking effort to the maximum extent for productivity and operational profitability (Hansen et al, 2022). It humbles itself, disdaining its perception and self-destructs by the excessive load it is taking on [work overload (McClurg et al, 2023)], mocking and belittling itself by "glorifying" its irrational choice of self-sacrifice to suffer willingly for business benefit . The workplace is a "barren" desert in which the "loaded camel"-employee sickens under the pressure of job stress physically and mentally (Gregory and Moates, 2023), conversely affecting its change readiness (Bhattacharya et al, 2021), but does not want to be healed or comforted [work addiction (McClurg et al, 2023)].…”

“…It reacts with friendship to "the ghost" [workplace reality over the last 15 years, during which methods of downsizing and cutting-pay are practised by organizations in a wide range (Yoon, 2023)], reaching out and begging as a "blessing" the opportunity of working, while feeling frightened by a silently implemented pay cut (Hansen et al, 2022) or by a potential dismissal (Yoon, 2023). The employee-camel lacks the "water of truth", a spiritual hydration and sense making of its work in a pleasant way (McClurg et al, 2023), just becauseeven soit finds a shelter through work, a disposable but nevertheless existing "lifevest", in its lack of existential meaning (Lata and Chaudhary, 2020) in the workplace (Pawar, 2017). It is precisely this state of the spirit proven to be along the way inadequate in "its [own] desert" and leads to the second phase of the change process.…”